A Tragic Honesty (31 page)

Escape of one sort or another was much on Yates's mind. He had deep misgivings about being a teacher, given his furtive conviction that writing couldn't be taught, or at any rate that he wasn't the person to teach it. Within days of moving into the basement he was clearly panicking at the prospect; he asked Cassill and Sam Lawrence to recommend him for an immediate place at the Yaddo and MacDowell colonies respectively, where perhaps he could finish his novel that very fall and forgo the trauma of teaching altogether. Yates would later make a practice of escaping to such places (particularly Yaddo) at troubled times in his life—but not now. Though Cassill and Lawrence were happy to oblige with glowing letters in his behalf, no spots were available on short notice, and Yates had little alternative but to report to the classroom as planned. “My New School class began yesterday,” he wrote a friend, “after a semi-sleepless night of certainty that I'd make a Hopeless Fool out of myself”—this in regard to his first class of the Fall
1960
semester; one can only imagine how he'd felt the year before.

But Yates was desperate enough to put aside his anxiety and give teaching a try. He could think of no more demoralizing prospect, after all, than an indefinite future of PR work—insipid, time-consuming, exhausting, and damaging to one's talent, not to mention sanity. To be sure, the New School per se (where he was paid all of $450 per class a semester) wasn't going to liberate him from Remington Rand, but graduate writing programs were becoming a kind of cottage industry, and Yates knew he'd have to build his credentials in order to get a secure footing at places that paid real money (e.g., Iowa). The New School, then, was the ground floor, but even at that humble level Yates was daunted—indeed, could hardly believe a man with only a high school education had any business teaching at all. Whatever else he lacked, it wasn't humility.

For a number of reasons, the New School was perhaps the ideal place to start. The program, founded by editor Hiram Haydn (who continued to watch Yates's career with interest), managed to attract a number of good writers who happened to be down on their luck. “If you were teaching at the New School, you acknowledged you weren't making it,” said Sidney Offit, one of Yates's colleagues along with Marguerite Young, Anatole Broyard, and Seymour Epstein. The upside of such tacit failure was that very few demands were made—no lesson plans, no meetings, no scrutiny. The head of the program, Hayes Jacobs, was a witty, easygoing man whose own writing had been almost entirely forfeited to the exigencies of teaching and hackwork (including Remington Rand); far from insisting that others follow his lead, Jacobs had become all the more laissez-faire toward his betters on the faculty. He and Yates got along famously.

New School teachers were on their own to the extent of having to compete for students, and this involved writing eye-catching course descriptions, lest a class be canceled for lack of interest. “Write it like a billboard,” Broyard advised Sidney Offit. “Yours is too understated.” The course description Yates wrote for
his
class (“Writing the Short Story. Thursdays, 10:30
A.M
.–12:10
P.M
.”) was nothing if not understated, though it managed to convey exactly the type of student Yates wanted, inasmuch as he wanted students at all: “Emphasis is on the craft and art of the short story as a serious fictional form, rather than on its commercial possibilities.” This was meant to warn away what Yates came to call the “dunces,” “clowns,” and “nice-biddy hobbyists” who expected to launch a lucrative sideline writing potboilers for the
Saturday Evening Post.

The later Yates who taught at the Iowa Workshop and sometimes liked to end sessions by, say, tossing a copy of
All the King's Men
into a trashcan (and kicking it for emphasis) was little in evidence at the New School. “Melancholy” is the first word that occurs to Lucy Davenport when she encounters the Yatesian teacher Carl Traynor in
Young Hearts Crying,
and the same word came to Peter Najarian's lips when he recalled his own New School class with Yates. “He didn't seem into teaching,” said Najarian. “People would read their work and Dick would comment on it. He was intelligent, gentle, but reticent and a little unprepared. He seemed very unsure of himself. It was clear that this was the first time he'd taught.” At the New School, Yates tended to be conciliatory to a fault—like Carl Traynor he'd “try to appease every difference of opinion in the room”—largely because he didn't think it his business to disparage the dunces, clowns, and nice-biddy hobbyists who populated most of his classes. But even then, students who were serious about writing and sought Yates's opinion in private could always expect consideration and total candor.

Najarian was perhaps the most noteworthy example of such a student from Yates's first year. In a letter to Cassill, Yates referred to Najarian as “a nineteen-year-old ex–juvenile delinquent (male) who's so loaded with talent it's almost a crime in itself.” As with all students who ever struck him as such, Yates took great pains with the young man: He recommended Najarian's work for inclusion in Hayes Jacobs's anthology
New Voices,
and responded to his stories with typed critiques that were blunt, funny, and generous:

“Theodore Schwertheim” was the only one of these [stories] that really interested me, because it's the one in which I sense the clearest detachment between writer and material. Theodore is truly poignant because you have taken the trouble to see him in the round; the others tend to be flat—quick illustrations of assorted human traits rather than real people. Your wisecrack about Sherwood Anderson at the end spares me the job of telling you who it derives from, but I'm not sure if I'd have bothered pointing that out anyway. The only way to get over being derivative is to go on writing until your own style evolves, and you've got plenty of time and ability for that.

He was also willing to meet informally with Najarian outside class, as it didn't occur to Yates then (and never would) that as a teacher he should make a distinction between students and drinking companions. An intense young man who desperately wanted to be a writer, Najarian took it upon himself to track Yates down to his subterranean lair, whereupon the latter poured him a tumbler of bourbon and listened gravely to whatever he had to say. Later, when they got hungry, they went to Chumley's restaurant and bar. “You are worth a thousand professors even though you do not know Latin, German, French, and why T. S. Eliot is god,” Najarian wrote Yates once the class was over.

Yates's own attitude toward his teaching remained skeptical at best, though at the end of that first year he waxed enthusiastic for Cassill's benefit: “I've had a real ball at the New School and can't thank you enough for the job,” he wrote with courteous hyperbole, and went on to say that while he hoped to teach the class again next year, he'd been advised that “some clown named Don M. Wolfe might be returning from Europe” to take over the job: “I'm quite prepared for your taking over again in the fall, but I would resent the hell out of being squeezed out by this Wolfe character (and who but a shithead would bill himself as ‘Don M.' anyway?).” Happily neither Wolfe nor Cassill returned, and the job remained Yates's for as long as he wanted it.

*   *   *

Next to finishing his novel, Yates's most urgent priority was to find a steady female companion. Night was a time of peculiar dread when he was alone, scarcely less so as a grown man than as a child sitting in the dark waiting for his mother to come home. He drank to get to sleep, and also to control a nervous desperation that threatened to overwhelm him since his marriage had ended. Such instability was hardly conducive to attracting even the most motherly, well meaning, or for that matter unconventional young woman—at least two of whom vividly remember, more than forty years later, their disquieting one-night encounters with the newly single Yates. Betty Rollin was a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate when Bob Riche introduced the two at a Village party.
*
Yates seemed charming and well spoken (if a bit too old), and Rollin allowed herself to be coaxed back to his apartment for a drink. But the ambience of the basement unnerved her, and she suddenly sensed that all was not well with her host: “There was something broken about the man,” she recalled, “as if he'd
been
through something. His talk was breezy and he had a good sense of humor, but I got the impression he was covering up a lot of darkness.” Rollin had no further contact with Yates, nor did Gail Richards after a single dinner at the Blue Mill. Richards was twenty-one when she met Yates through Rust Hills at
Esquire
. At first she was rather attracted by his brooding quality—but something more unsettling emerged at the Blue Mill: “I thought I was witnessing the beginning of a breakdown,” she said. “I wasn't easily scared off in those days—a certain amount of angst was interesting—but this was outside my comprehension. He had a kind of fractured intensity: distraught, jumpy, anxious, with these very busy gesticulating hands.” And no matter what Yates's terrible need at the time, neither episode was simply a matter of first-date jitters; the unanimous impression among his acquaintances, male or female, was that he was fighting a losing battle to hold himself together. “It was exhausting to be in his company,” said Warren Owens, who'd met Yates shortly after his separation. “He showed constant signs of strain—smoking, fidgeting, knocking over glasses. I was always happy to see Dick, but just as happy to leave him.”

Yates's quest for a mate sometimes took him far afield. In November 1959 he and Bob Parker went on a road trip to a Montreal television studio to watch a live performance of “The Best of Everything,” adapted for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The excursion was the basis for a memorable scene in
Young Hearts Crying,
in which Tom Nelson remarks to Davenport, “You figure there'll be some nice girl in the show, and she'll come up to you with big eyes and say ‘You mean you're the
author
?'”—and Davenport takes offense, since that was exactly what he (and Yates)
had
figured. Bob Parker points out that the fictional version of this incident is “accurate in almost every respect,” except for the “insidious motives” attributed to himself in the person of Tom Nelson. Indeed, Parker remembers a rather pleasant outing, quite devoid of friction as far as he could tell at the time. The only abrasive teasing took place at the Canadian border, where Parker made fun of a Mountie's hat, but the rest of the drive was a cheerful wintry idyll. And then in Montreal, just as the lonely Yates had hoped, there
was
“some nice girl in the show” who thought highly of his story and writers in general, and she
did
invite both men back to her house and, yes, it
was
a little awkward. But as Parker wrote in his essay “A Clef”—a barbed rebuttal to
Young Hearts Crying
—there was no question of his refusing, à la Tom Nelson, to take the hint and leave Yates alone with an actress ripe for seduction: “Yates was so preoccupied with the whiskey that he didn't notice the glazed look in her eyes. She finally said to me, ‘I'm going to bed. Tell him to leave some of Daddy's liquor.'”
*

Yates's ongoing funk may have discouraged romance, but it was rarely without its lighter side. Once, when he and Riche were having a diner breakfast after a long night, Yates wandered off to get cigarettes out of a machine and inadvertently put his quarter into the jukebox instead (after a puzzled moment he selected “Love Me Tender”). And sometimes he'd channel his “fractured intensity” into madcap improvisational shticks, such as the blocked songwriter at the piano: “Baked Alaska! Baked Alaska!” he'd sing to the tune of “K-K-K-Katie,” then scratch his head and mutter, “No no, that's not it.” Or else he'd invent wacky variations on clichéd movie scenarios, his favorite being
A Star Is Born
; Yates adored the idea of the washed-up husband dying for the sake of an ascendant, noble wife, and liked to ponder the many diverting ways such a situation might come to pass.

In some respects Yates's “second bachelorhood” (as he called it) began to look up when he befriended his New School colleague, Anatole Broyard. For a decade or so, Broyard's stories had appeared in prestigious little magazines, and Yates had lasting respect for him not only as the author of “some of the finest autobiographical fiction [he'd] ever read,” but also as a wit whose various
mots
Yates quoted for many years. In the early days, though, the larger part of Broyard's reputation rested on his being—as the writer Anne Bernays (a former girlfriend) put it—“the greatest cocksman in New York for a decade”; she also called him “a mean man,” and was not alone in thinking so, particularly among women. Cassill, who lived around the corner from Broyard in the late fifties, would often step out to get a morning newspaper and spot his illustrious neighbor escorting a young woman home or to school. As for Broyard's friendship with Yates, it puzzled Cassill for a while, and then it didn't: “Dick was forthright, honest, a bit unsophisticated at times. Broyard was the opposite: mendacious, crafty, disingenuous. But he had a success formula with women, and Dick envied that. He'd come to New York to lead a bolder life, and Broyard was a model for this life.”

Certainly Yates needed all the laughs he could get, and Broyard had a nice way of working ribaldry into even the most elevated discourse. Of a writer well-known to both, Broyard told Yates, “Reading him is like the guy trying to fuck his girlfriend on the beach, but his dick keeps falling in the sand. Finally he gets it in and the girl says, ‘Put it back in the sand.'” Broyard was perhaps Yates's first writer friend for whom literature was a digression rather than the main theme. Some twenty years later, when another of Yates's friends was wondering whether to circumcise his first son, Yates remarked how Broyard used to brag about the way women liked to play with his foreskin during fellatio. At the time Yates was mostly amused, but also a little appalled: “Anatole goes up to the Museum of Modern Art on Friday afternoons,” he told Cassill, “picks up a nice girl from a good college, takes her home for the weekend—then kicks her out. And they
love
him for this. I go to bed with
one
of them and they want to marry me!” But then Yates was grateful for whatever odd success came his way, and Broyard's example was something of an inspiration.